The growing popularity of cloud computing has enabled individuals and organizations to provision and de-provision virtual computing devices according to their needs. An organization may be able to spin up dozens of new devices from stored images in minutes, rather than spending hours manually configuring physical machines. Images may also be used as backups for important data or as default system configurations for various employee types. A newly hired developer might have one image provisioned to their new laptop while an accountant might have a different image provisioned to their desktop. Efficiently creating and storing images is an important problem, but so, too, is efficiently provisioning images. Neither end users nor administrators are especially patient about the delays that may arise from slow-functioning provisioning systems.
Traditional systems for provisioning systems from images may be designed for occasionally restoring backups after a critical failure and may not be optionally designed for frequently provisioning images. In some examples, traditional systems may be designed to provision images from complete images, rather than segments, and may not be optimally configured for provisioning from image segments. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for provisioning frequently used image segments from caches.